[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About SQL Server in Cabo

I watched the sun rise from my balcony in Cabo this morning and answer your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

Here’s what we covered:

• 00:00 Introductions
• 00:42 Student: Hi Brent! Why is full backup sometimes slow and sometimes fast in similar situations? This problem will be resolved after restarting the server but it comes back again.
• 02:58 Frank Peters Netherlands: What is your opinion of the Polybase feature in SQL 2019? I read it could possibly replace ETL and perform better than Linked Servers due to being able to scale out. Or are there still some major (performance) drawbacks?
• 04:50 Scooter: Hi Brent, not a question… Just wanted to say how much we appreciate your training, office hours, and tools. Thanks for all you do for the SQL Server community.
• 05:30 Paul: Hi Brent, what are the common performance issues you run into with queries generated by ORM’s such as Entity Framework? How do you deal with them?
• 06:46 Mattia Nocerino: DB is 130 GB, biggest table (log) 56 GB. Inserting 1 row at a time, no updates/deletes. Columnscore gave me a D. SELECTs are mostly executed on recent data. Thinking about keeping last year worth of data and move the rest to another DB, to improve RTO. What is your recommendation
• 08:32 Saverio: Nowadays it is common for (my friend’s) servers to have almost exclusively SSDs instead of HDDs. What are your thoughs about maintenance (Statistics Update and Index Rebuild) from this point of view? It’s still a big concern or something less important?
• 09:41 Myron: Which is better in your opinion Azure, VM or physical hardware for a new SQL Server install?
• 10:55 Youssef: What are your recommendations for keeping SQL agent jobs in sync between primary and secondary always on servers?
• 12:07 Mr. Griffith: Have you ever been hired as an expert witness in a lawsuit? We’ve got a vendor telling us NOLOCK is the solution to the blocking problems for our mission-critical application..
• 12:38 Byron: What are the top mistakes you see from clients with respect to sql backups and integrity checks?
• 14:58 Erdem: Hi Brent, is it ok to use ‘DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS’ to simulate running a cold – slow query on production?
• 16:00 Maciej: Hi Brent, my friend recently learned (to his own surprise) that Microsoft fixed (in SSMS 18.9) the bug with IntelliSense error message while connecting to SQL Server using DAC. Do you have a bug in SSMS and/or SQL Server that you treat (at this point) as an old friend? 😉
• 18:26 Old DBA: I had a coworker tell me that stored procedures are no longer the way people are doing sql and that we need to stop. I feel he is absolutely wrong, what are your thoughts?
• 20:31 Maksim Bondarenko: Hi Brent! My friend says that when we use RCSI we shouldn’t use FILLFACTOR=100 because 14-byte version pointers added to the modified rows. What do you think about that?
• 22:07 Theo: How often do you recommend taking inventory of all company SQL servers and their configuration?
• 23:25 Fred: To what extent should the developers be involved in creation of new NC indexes on prod? Let them run sp_blitzindex?
• 25:33 Wrap-up